I like this query from Youtuber Marques Brownlee, who goes by MKBHD. He asks: “What is a photo?” It is a deep query.

Simply take into consideration how early black-and-white movie cameras labored. You pointed the digicam at, say, a tree and pressed a button. This opened the shutter in order that mild may move by a lens (or multiple lens) to mission a picture of the tree onto the movie. As soon as this movie was developed, it displayed a picture—a photograph. However that photograph is only a illustration of what was actually there, and even what the photographer noticed with their very own eyes. The colour is lacking. The photographer has adjusted settings just like the digicam’s focus, depth of area, or shutter pace and chosen movie that impacts issues just like the brightness or sharpness of the picture. Adjusting the parameters of the digicam and movie is the job of the photographer; that is what makes pictures a type of artwork.

Now soar forward in time. We’re utilizing digital smartphone cameras as an alternative of movie, and these telephones have made large enhancements: higher sensors, multiple lens, and options comparable to picture stabilization, longer publicity instances, and excessive dynamic vary, through which the telephone takes a number of pictures with totally different exposures and combines them for a extra superior picture.

However they’ll additionally do one thing that was the job of the photographer: Their software program can edit the picture. On this video, Brownlee used the digicam in a Samsung Galaxy S23 Extremely to take a photo of the moon. He used a 100X zoom to get a brilliant good—and steady—moon picture. Perhaps too good.

The video—and others prefer it—sparked a reply on Reddit from a person who goes by “ibreakphotos.” In a check, they used the digicam to take a photograph of a blurry picture of the moon on a pc monitor—and nonetheless produced a crisp, detailed picture. What was happening?

Brownlee adopted up with another video, saying that he’d replicated the check with related outcomes. The element, he concluded, is a product of the digicam’s AI software program, not simply its optics. The digicam’s processes “principally AI sharpen what you see within the viewfinder in the direction of what it is aware of the moon is meant to appear like,” he says within the video. Ultimately, he says, “the stuff that comes out of a smartphone digicam isn’t a lot actuality as a lot because it’s this laptop’s interpretation of what it thinks you’d like actuality to appear like.”

(When WIRED’s Gear Workforce lined the moon shot dustup, a Samsung spokesperson advised them, “When a person takes a photograph of the moon, the AI-based scene optimization expertise acknowledges the moon as the primary object and takes a number of pictures for multi-frame composition, after which AI enhances the main points of the picture high quality and colors.” Samsung posted an explanation of how its Scene Optimizer operate works when taking pictures of the moon, in addition to methods to flip it off. You may learn extra from the Gear Workforce on computational photography here, and see extra from Brownlee on the topic here.)